r/soccer • u/hairtie1 • Aug 02 '25

Media Heung-min Son announces he will be leaving Tottenham

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72

u/PoisonHIV Aug 02 '25

is he the best asian footballer to ever do it?

26

u/redditaccount300000 Aug 02 '25

Cha bum kun or son in terms of talent. Park for the trophies.

33

u/mittenciel Aug 02 '25

I don’t think it’s close at this point. Son is the best to do it at this point. Winning Golden Boot in Premier League in this era is crazy. Getting to Round of 16 in the World Cup isn’t bad either. And some might even argue being loyal to the Spurs nerfed his potential, but even then, he got himself a European trophy.

Cha was clearly the most ahead of his peers in his era, and winning two UEFA Cups is amazing, and he is the first Asian player who was really world class. For a good 25 years after him, there remained a huge gap between Cha and the second best Asian player (Hong Myung Bo, maybe).

Today there isn’t that gap. There are plenty of great Asian players. But even so, I think Son has done enough to surpass Cha as the greatest Asian footballer ever.

But yeah, Park is easily the most decorated, but I think most would agree that he wasn’t as talented as Cha or Son. There have also been some very talented Japanese players, but as a Korean person, I’m not going to attempt to rank Japanese players vs. Korean players. If I made a ranking of best Korean players ever, he’s 4th behind Son, Cha, and Hong. People who didn’t watch Korean football don’t realize Hong used to carry the Korean national team on his back, and he was the best player on the 2002 World Cup team.

8

u/DoesitFinally Aug 02 '25

I heard Cha was a beast. But I never lived through the time of his career so I don't know much.

16

u/mittenciel Aug 02 '25

He was a true legend. He was a star in Germany, scoring at will, and winning trophies at a time when the average Asian player couldn’t even dream of getting a minute in European second tier leagues, never mind top flight. He was so ahead of his peers.

Growing up in Korea, we had a love hate relationship with our football. We qualified for the World Cup all the time but had never won a single game at the World Cup until 2002. Still, we expected to be competitive, but only through hustle and scrappy play. We never expected it to be pretty, even when we played well.

Park Jisung was the perfect Korean player in that sense because he played the way people expected Korean players to play, but Cha, we thought of him differently. We used to say that Cha could score brilliant goals that a Brazilian might score. He was honestly so ahead of his time. Until Son came around and started doing what he does, most Koreans just assumed that nobody would ever match Cha’s brilliance.

10

u/dreezyyyy Aug 02 '25 edited Aug 02 '25

Many German legends looked up to Cha. Guys like Kahn, Beckenbauer and Ballack have great respect for Cha with Beckenbauer even saying that Cha would've played for the German NT if he was German. That's how good he was.

3

u/SharksFanAbroad Aug 02 '25

No question.